Jews don’t drink too much. It interferes with our suffering.
—Milton Berle
Why do you think you were once so obsessed with Sandra Bernhard?
No, that’s Sarah Bernhardt, isn’t it?
Howard Schultz is Jewish, I assume?
Did you realize that anyone whose last name is the name of a large European city (e.g., London, Paris) tends to be Jewish?
What do we do with that info?
The rootless cosmopole?
You haven’t attended services in more than thirty years, but you often name-check growing up in a left-wing, borderline red-diaper (pink-diaper?) Jewish family. Why mention it, though, if you’re not going to explore it?
Reflected engagé glory?
When Leonard Michaels says that Kafka was never more Jewish than when he said he wasn’t Jewish, what does he mean?
Recognize anything of yourself in that embrace and re-nunciation?
Henry Roth, say. Kosinski. Benjamin. Arendt. Proust. Koestenbaum. Babel. Adler. Levé. Markson. Gornick. Daitch. Spiegelman. You see the through line, don’t you, quite beyond mere Jewishness?
Was Koufax everything to you as a kid?
That incredible California vanity license plate KFX 000—was anything ever better?
And even now you struggle to get proper distance on Israel, don’t you?
I Would Have Saved Them If I Could—it’s all right there in that perfect Michaels title, isn’t it?
Didn’t you meet his widow in Oakland recently?
Did you feel like a tertiary character in a Henry James novella?
All religious belief is, to you, utter nonsense?